Fun fact! These cases, like the bananas, snails, or carrots being classified as fruit, were all being used as examples of “lol, dumb EU bureaucracy”, but were actually examples of brilliant lawmaking.

The curvature of bananas was specifically aimed at making it harder for China to flood the EU market with their bananas, thus saving local production from going bust.

The snails were a similar case to the carrots. The EU has subsidies for jam makers, to make them more competitive with non-EU jam makers. As it turned out, in one region in France, people made jam from carrots, but “jam” was defined in legislature as “a product made from fruits”. Which meant that the EU could spend a lot of time and money on re-writing the original law allowing the subsidies… or just redefine carrots as “fruits” for the specific purpose of that one law. As in: nobody in the EU considers carrots as fruits, it was only and specifically done to allow those French farmers to get subsidies for their jam making.

It’s brilliant and efficient.